The use of extensible markup language (XML) technology in browser and other technology has expanded and continues to grow. Because XML represents documents and other data and objects in an innately hierarchical or tree-based fashion, ordered relationships, parsing, searching and other operations and constructs may be relatively easily or naturally constructed and used. The use of XML has consequently progressed from browser applications to database, operating system and other applications. XML may now be extended to supporting the user interface and other components of systems and applications for example through the use of extensible application markup language (XAML), which permits programmers to encode operating system, application and other elements in object-rooted hierarchical format.
However, while XML has enjoyed increasingly standardized use in a range of applications, the platform is not without certain drawbacks or disadvantages. Significant among those are the fact that XML-based representations of documents or objects are typically larger than some other formats, such as binary files or others. While computer storage and network capacity continue to grow, even with comparatively rich client or network resources XML/XAML-based data may demand significant amounts of time to load onto a client machine or download over a network. Application load times are a facet of computer performance most closely perceived by users as affecting system responsiveness. So while the deployment of XML and related technology continues to grow, techniques to make the platform more efficient in storage and use are desirable. Other disadvantages of conventional XML-related technology exist.